by Amanda Tru
“She didn’t deserve to be with him,” Missy replied defiantly.
“Well, neither did you,” her father roared. “Did you stop and think about that, little girl? Did you stop and think that maybe slicing his girlfriend up a dozen ways to Sunday isn’t the most effective way to win a man’s affections? No, you didn’t, because your brain is so sick and so perverted. That’s why your mother left, you know. You scared her. Even as a little kid, you scared her, doing what you did to those animals around the neighborhood. And what about the others? I can’t believe you keep on expecting me to cover up for you, especially when you get on one of these sprees of yours. I know what you did at that homeless camp, even though you tried to hide it from me. I mean, come on, Missy. You’re getting more than sloppy. You’re downright stupid. A gas station? Didn’t you think there’d be security cameras? And what about that waitress? I wouldn’t have had to kill her, but you were so careless you let someone see you drop that girl off at the diner. Of course I had to come and clean up after your mess.”
“It’s always worked before,” Missy said.
“That’s because I was working my butt off to cover for you,” her dad exclaimed. “I’m sick of it. I really am. You’re a danger to yourself. You’re a danger to my career. I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do with you.”
There was silence for a moment, and Cosette pictured father and daughter staring each other down. The conversation happened so rapidly that Cosette still wasn’t entirely sure of everything she heard. She could make sense of individual sentences, but when put together, her mind drew a blank. So Missy had killed Dawn, Josh’s girlfriend back in high school? And her father helped cover it up. But what about everything else her dad was yelling about? Animals? Homeless camps?
And what was going to happen to Cosette now that she’d overheard their entire dialogue?
“I just wanted to make you proud of me.” Missy spoke with a perpetual whine, and Cosette pictured her with an unattractive pout fixed on her face.
“You know what would make me proud?” Her dad’s voice was calmer now, steady and contained, which made it sound even more threatening than when he’d been shouting. “It would make me proud if you got over whatever sickness you’ve got up in that twisted little brain of yours, if you stopped these petulant killing sprees and acted like a normal girl your age. Get a job, get a degree, I don’t care what you do. You’re the most abnormal freak I’ve ever laid eyes on. I don’t blame your mother for leaving, by the way. You’re a monster. A freak. No individual in their right mind does the things you’ve done. They certainly don’t keep doing it over and over again just for the joy of it. You’re sick in the head, a danger to my career, and you’re a disgrace to our good family name.”
Cosette sensed the electric tension in the room, clenched her eyes shut, and prayed even harder for deliverance as she heard Missy yell, “I’ll kill you for that, you liar!”
During the sounds of the ensuing scuffle, the shrieks of an outraged Missy, the curses of her violent father, Cosette knew that the Bible talked about God’s power and salvation.
She knew that somewhere in Anchorage, her parents worried about her, searched for her, prayed for her.
She knew that somewhere, God existed and could see everything happening in this room, even though Cosette herself was still shackled and blindfolded.
She knew that there was a Bible verse that her mom loved to quote, a verse about protection. Something about birds. Something about being able to trust God even when you feel scared. Even when you’re in danger.
But she couldn’t recall a single word. In fact, her entire prayer vocabulary consisted of two words. God, help!
Cosette’s whole body tensed at the sound of Missy’s murderous roar. When she heard the crazed woman’s footsteps charging toward her, Cosette lowered her head toward her lap and managed to pry the blindfold off her eyes. The light nearly blinded her just as Missy plowed into her, knocking Cosette’s wind out and toppling the wheelchair to the ground.
Her arms were still bound to the chair. Something in her wrist snapped.
For a moment, Cosette thought that her time to die had come, that God had decided not to answer her prayers, but Missy didn’t even appear to register Cosette’s bound body beneath her. She jumped up, swearing at her father, and lunged toward him with a large knife aimed straight toward his chest.
Cosette didn’t want to watch the violence, but her brain wouldn’t let her shut her eyes. Still bound to the collapsed wheelchair, she stared transfixed, watching as Missy’s father grabbed an iron rod and swung it up to his shoulder like a baseball bat. Cosette’s wrist surged with pain from the fall. Her lungs refused to take in breath. Her heart appeared to be the only organ that still functioned as it pounded violently in her chest, pumping terror and agony and adrenaline throughout her entire body.
Missy screamed and leaped through the air, her knife aimed directly at her father’s chest. Cosette tried to scream a warning — to whom she couldn’t have guessed — but her voice was stuck in her throat.
Missy’s father took a swing. His daughter’s body crumpled on impact. The sound of metal on bone echoed and reverberated between Cosette’s ringing ears. Missy collapsed in a heap on the floor and was totally silent.
Cosette’s heart finally paused for a moment. Breath returned to her lungs. Was it over?
The dead silence was broken by the sound of a wet gargle. Cosette stared in horror at Missy’s father, who loomed tall above her, the metal rod still in his hand. This time, her body obeyed her instinct, and she did her best to draw her legs toward her chest in a feeble attempt to protect herself from the oncoming attack.
Except it never came.
The metal bar clanked to the floor. The senator took one more stumbling step toward her. That’s when Cosette saw the knife sticking out his chest, the blood on his hand as he tried to stop the flow.
“She never would listen,” he said to her in a voice that was eerily calm and collected. “She was just like her mother that way. She never would listen.”
He glanced at the motionless form of his daughter on the floor, took one more gurgling gasp, and fell facedown just inches away from where Cosette lay crouched and terrified on the cold concrete.
“You’re positive she’s going to be okay?” Mom asked, refusing to let go of Cosette’s hand. Her grip stung, but Cosette wasn’t about to ask her mom to pull away.
The doctor repeated his assurances for the third or fourth time. “It’s nothing a quick surgery, and a little metal rod can’t fix. She’ll be as good as new in a couple of days. Your daughter’s a very lucky girl.”
“Not lucky,” Mom answered back. “Blessed.”
Cosette was still getting meds and warm fluids through her IV to control the pain and ward off symptoms of shock. Even though she’d never left the hospital premises, it had taken hours before security found her next to two dead bodies in a small storage room in the basement.
“You sure you don’t hurt too much, baby?” Mom asked, leaning over so close that Cosette could smell the coffee on her breath.
“I’m okay,” she assured her. Cosette’s throat was raw from screaming for help, her mind and body still shaken from being abducted, then watching a father and daughter kill each other. After the doctor got done discussing the results of Cosette’s x-rays and her upcoming surgery, the family was scheduled to meet with one of the hospital chaplains. Cosette wondered if there was anything a chaplain could say to ease the fear that had settled into the core of her psyche. Maybe it would at least help her mom feel less guilty for leaving Cosette’s bedside to run to the store.
Her surgery was scheduled for tomorrow morning. Cosette’s father had spent the past thirty minutes firing questions at Detective Grace, talking to doctors and nurses, and making calls back home to let everyone at work know he was taking the rest of the month off work. Cosette certainly hoped she’d be out of the hospital and out of Alaska long before that, but she app
reciated his concern. Besides, he needed to have something useful to do. Dad’s next order of business was to get on the phone with her very skin-and-bones insurance company to try to coordinate care with the Anchorage hospital.
“I don’t want you to worry about paying off bills with everything else you’ve had to go through,” he explained, his voice uncharacteristically weak.
Cosette hadn’t had the heart to ask her father what was going to happen to Josh now. She had relayed all she could remember about the conversation and fight between Missy and her father. Everything from that conversation seemed to exonerate Josh from any and all charges, Cosette’s attack, Dottie’s murder, even his high-school girlfriend’s death.
Detective Grace had also jumped on the mention of homeless camps, and based on the intensive line of questioning that followed, Cosette gathered that Missy had been involved in far more crimes than just assaulting Josh’s love interests.
The fact that Josh wasn’t a murderer or the one responsible for Cosette’s attack outside the gas station was a relief, but it still didn’t explain where he’d gone or why he’d run away. Right now, Cosette didn’t have the energy to focus on any of that. All she could think about was getting her body and mind to relax, to manage the physical pain as much as she could. As long as there were doctors who wanted to discuss her care and detectives who wanted her to repeat all the details she could remember from her time of being trapped in that room with a madwoman and her father, Cosette could ignore everything else.
Including the pain in her wrists, her head, all over her entire body.
Including the fear, the trauma, the questions that still plagued her about who Josh really was.
The surgeon left after giving Mom his card and telling Cosette he’d see her bright and early the next morning. A few minutes later, a man with hands the size of cantaloupes and a confident voice appeared in the doorway. “Hi, I’m Peter, one of the chaplains here,” he announced.
Mom seemed to mentally collapse at the word chaplain, and before Peter even had time to sit down by the hospital bed, she was telling him about everything their family had endured over the past two days.
Peter didn’t say much, but it wasn’t as if Mom needed much encouragement to keep up her side of the conversation. Hearing all the details coming out of her mother’s mouth forced Cosette to relive the worst of the trauma and fear. Her shaking intensified until finally Peter looked over gently at Mom and said, “I wonder if we could take a break for just a minute so I can ask your daughter a few questions.”
Mom looked sheepishly into her lap. “Of course. I shouldn’t have started dumping all that on you the moment you walked in the door. I’m so sorry. Of course you’re here for Cosette. She needs you more than I do,” Mom concluded with a nervous and unconvincing chuckle.
Peter’s eyes were kind and full of compassion. “Sounds like you’ve gone through quite the series of events,” he announced.
Cosette didn’t know what to say. What she did know was that she somehow felt safer than she had before this man entered the room.
“I’m going to go check on your father,” Mom said and made an awkward exit.
Peter hadn’t pulled his eyes away from Cosette’s. “Mind if I ask you a few questions?”
She nodded, uncertain what was supposed to happen next. She’d never met with a chaplain before. Was she supposed to talk to him as if he were her own pastor? Lie here in bed while he read her Bible verses or prayed with her?
A few minutes later, however, the conversation flowed quite easily as Cosette told Peter about the first day she met Josh online, about how excited she felt to see their relationship progressing, about how strong of a connection they seemed to share when they sat at the diner talking with Dottie. Had that only been yesterday? It was still strange to think that Dottie was dead, yet another victim in Missy and her father’s murderous insanity.
“And how do you feel about things now?” Peter asked. “About your relationship with this young man.”
“Well, I mean, I’m obviously relieved to know he wasn’t the one who did any of this to me.” She glanced down at her hospital gown, at the IV sticking out of her forearm, at all the bandages covering her body. “But I don’t really know what’s supposed to happen next.”
“What do you mean?” Peter asked. He spoke quietly and slowly, as if he had all the time in the world to sit here and listen to every single thought untangling itself in the chaos of Cosette’s mind.
“Well, I mean, even though he was innocent, he should have told me about his time in jail, don’t you think?” She looked to Peter, waiting for affirmation.
“It does seem like something you would divulge before your relationship progressed to a certain point.” His response sounded somewhat canned and forced, but it gave momentum to the thoughts spinning around in Cosette’s head.
“Right. I mean, if he’d told me at some point before I flew out here, hey you know what? Ten years ago, I was falsely accused of murder and went to jail before they threw out my conviction. The crime’s still unsolved, but it’s likely that it’s this crazy sociopath who was my girlfriend’s best friend… I mean, I told him everything about my past. I told him about all my auditions I was hoping to get and the acting classes I’d enrolled in and every single email I’d sent to agents in the past four years. There wasn’t anything about my life I didn’t tell him. And he…”
Cosette paused, wondering if it was wrong for her to speak so openly to someone she hardly knew. Isn’t that exactly what got her in trouble with Josh to begin with?
“He didn’t reciprocate by being both open and honest with you. Is that it?”
Cosette continued enthusiastically. “Right. That’s exactly right. It’s like he didn’t trust me enough to tell me the whole truth about his past. So now I’m left wondering what else he kept from me, you know?”
Peter nodded slowly. There was something deliberate, almost methodical about his movements. “What do you expect to happen now?” he asked when Cosette lost track of what she was about to say.
“With Josh?”
He nodded again.
“I really have no idea. I don’t even know where he is. I’m not even sure he…”
Their conversation was interrupted by a knock. Cosette turned to see Josh standing in her doorway with an elaborate flower bouquet in his hands and a painfully awkward expression on his face.
“Is that him?” Peter asked quietly.
Cosette nodded.
“Would you like the chance to talk with him in private?”
Cosette hesitated.
“You don’t have to,” Peter assured her in a whisper.
Josh was still standing in the doorway. Cosette gave him a smile. “It’s all right,” she told the chaplain. “I think we need some time alone. We have a lot to talk about.”
Cosette watched Josh shift his weight nervously from one foot to the other. She had to admit that even after everything, she felt incredibly sorry for him.
“Cosette, listen, I just want to…”
“I know,” she interrupted.
“I’m just,” Josh began again with a sheepish blush coloring his face, “I’m glad you’re okay. I mean, that is to say, I’m glad it wasn’t worse or anything like that.”
Cosette didn’t respond.
“And about all that other stuff…”
He looked so helpless. She had to find a way to make this easier for him.
“Listen, I know about your girlfriend. And I’m sorry about what happened. About her getting murdered. Your going to jail for it. But you should have told me. I can’t believe you kept something like that from me for all these months.”
“I know, I was…”
She wasn’t ready to give up her flow of thought. She had to get this out before his endearing face and puppy-dog expression melted her heart to the point beyond recovery.
“Let me finish,” she pleaded. “I trusted you. I came out here to visit you, to spend time with yo
u…” Her voice caught, and she took a deep breath to calm her nerves. This wasn’t the type of conversation she was willing to have while on the verge of breaking down into tears.
“I really was looking forward to getting to know you,” she said after composing herself. “And then I got here, and I’m not even talking about my injuries. I can’t blame you for those. But after everything that’s happened, I don’t even know who you are.”
“Cosette,” he said, taking a step closer toward her bed. “Listen, I know there were things that should have come out earlier. I just… Everyone back home knew my story, and when I met you, it was nice not having that. Not being known as the guy who wasted two years of his life in jail. Even worse, some folks are always going to believe I killed someone and got away with it. I wanted to tell you. I really did, and you’re right. You deserve to know, but you were literally the first person I’d met in years who didn’t already know my entire story, who hadn’t already come to some conclusion about whether I was guilty or not. I didn’t want to lose that feeling.”
Cosette didn’t know what to say. When she’d started this conversation, she’d planned on allowing Josh to defend himself, to explain his actions. Deep in her heart, she hoped that what he had to say might change her mind. Might convince her to give him another chance.
But she couldn’t.
“I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “I really don’t know you the way I thought I did. There’s no changing that.”
“We can change it now,” he said earnestly. “Ask me anything. I promise I’ll tell you the truth, no matter what you want to know. Here, let me show you how honest I am. My given name was Adam Bird. After the conviction got thrown out, I changed it to Joshua Lawson.”
She paused, waiting. Did he have more to say?